Ukrainian Holocaust memorial vandalized

August 21, 2008 9:00am

A Holocaust monument was vandalized in western Ukraine.

The Holocaust memorial in Lvov was smeared with paint, swastikas and anti-Semitic graffiti. It stands outside the Valley of Death, a site near the city’s Janowska death camp, where more than 200,000 Jews were murdered between 1941 and 1943.

The memorial was constructed in 1992 by Dr. Aleksandr Schwarz, a retired scientist living in Munich who believes he is the camp’s last living survivor. As a teenager he watched the shooting of his father and was assigned to bury the bodies of Jews shot to death in the Valley of Death.

A group of German tourists discovered the vandalized memorial last week and alerted authorities.

It was not the first time that Jewish memorials in Lvov were vandalized this year. It is unclear whether law enforcement agencies are investigating the monument case.